Steven Soderbergh
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“I’m a Good Director’s Actor”: Clive Owen, Back To One, Episode 295
When you look at the illustrious career of Clive Owen, you see choices made based on the depth of the roles (Closer, Children of Men, Hemingway and Gellhorn, The Knick), not on trajectory or star power. His two latest projects, Monsieur Spade and A Murder At The End of The World, are quality television series where he’s able to settle in and deliver the grounded, nuanced work we’ve come to expect from him. On this episode, he explains why he needs time to prepare a role, and the “marination” process that is required. He talks about the qualities found in […]
by Peter Rinaldi on Jun 11, 2024 -
Sundance 2024: Presence, A Real Pain
An experiment in shooting a movie entirely from a first-person POV, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence has conceptual precedents but no meaningful ones in terms of the camera’s weight and the operator’s resulting physical relationship to it. 1947’s Lady in the Lake tried nonstop subjectivity with a bulky 35mm camera; 2009’s Enter the Void eliminated the embodied camera in its second half of weightless drifting. More recently there’s Hardcore Henry, which strapped GoPros to its protagonist’s head for a bouncy embodiment of a stuntman’s hardest workday. In Presence, Soderbergh’s longtime practice of acting as his own cinematographer and operator takes on an […]
by Vadim Rizov on Jan 21, 2024 -
“14 Inches From a Very Personal Form of Murder”: Steven Soderbergh on Camera as Character and His Sundance Horror Film, Presence
A heady, elegantly-constructed ghost story, Steven Soderbergh’s Presence has a bunch of half-buried threads, a couple of perfectly-timed scares, and a horrific close-up of an act of violence that mesmerizes the camera—just as horror films mesmerize their audience. The camera is the star here, and not merely because its sustained, floating movements, its sudden turns and retreats, its anxious hovering display the virtuosity of the operator who is also the film’s director, but because it is the titular character, the unseen presence whose half-life is disturbed and then engaged by a family of four that moves into a suburban house […]
by Amy Taubin on Jan 20, 2024 -
From 50 Crew Members to Five: Director Eddie Alcazar on Divinity
“Unfortunately, because aging is so common and natural, we tend to think of it as destiny or something we should accept,” says biologist and researcher David Sinclair. And while the scientist’s work on aging and epigenetics is tied to discoveries in biology from the mid-20th century onwards, within the arts the theme of immortality goes back centuries. Filmmaker Eddie Alcazar, who appeared on our 25 New Faces list in 2011, is the latest to tackle man’s search for eternal life, doing so at a time when interest in longevity and even avoidance of death is contemplated by tech community thinkers […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 17, 2023 -
Steven Soderbergh Announces Sci-Fi Series Command Z Dropping on His Website July 17
Although his new miniseries Full Circle just premiered on Max, Steven Soderbergh has announced today that another episodic project—which he allegedly made between Magic Mike’s Last Dance and Full Circle—will be ready to watch by next week. Command Z, an eight episode sci-fi project that’s roughly 90 minutes overall, will launch on Soderbergh’s website, Extension 765, this Monday, July 17. As of right now, a trailer for Command Z is available to watch on the site. Command Z takes place sometime in the distant future and revolves around a mission that a lead scientist (Michael Cera, appearing only via screen) […]
by Natalia Keogan on Jul 14, 2023 -
“Always Maximize Your Shooting Time”: Lodge Kerrigan on Keane
If every film is a document of its own making, then Lodge Kerrigan’s Keane, shot in real locations in and around New York City in 2004, is also a depiction of the period in which it was made. Viewing the film on the occasion of a new digital restoration by Grasshopper Film that begins a theatrical run at Film at Lincoln Center today, I was struck by the numerous billboards and posters placed atop taxi cabs that the film’s lead character, William Keane (Damian Lewis), obliviously walks by. Short of pointing at the screen, Leonardo DiCaprio-style, as I noticed a […]
by Erik Luers on Aug 19, 2022 -
Review: Steven Soderbergh’s Bright-Hued Techno Thriller Kimi, Starring Zoe Kravitz
Want 87 minutes of something bright and beautiful with a cool kind of “hotness?” Try Kimi, a minimalist thriller in which Steven Soderbergh’s camera and an electric-blue-haired Zoe Kravitz move in sync like two rare birds in flight. Kravitz plays Angela Childs, a data stream analyst for a company behind “KIMI”, a more responsive version of the ALEXA smart audio device, that’s about to go public. The movie opens with a sleazy-looking guy doing a Zoom presser from his kitchen (COVID remote rules, a sketchy company or both?) explaining that KIMI is better than other devices because its communication skills are […]
by Amy Taubin on Feb 9, 2022 -
“Christine [Choy] Has Always Been a Person Who Puts Her Ideals into Action”: The Exiles Directors Violet Columbus and Ben Klein
The first rule of documentary film? “Lie to everyone.” This from no less an authority (and anti-authority) than Christine Choy, the Oscar-nominated filmmaker (Who Killed Vincent Chin?) and educator (NYU, Cornell, Yale, etc.), founding director of Third World Newsreel, and straight-shooting (no pun intended) civil rights rabble-rouser. (Once during the US Film and Video Festival – soon to be rebranded Sundance – Choy even pulled Robert Redford aside to bluntly ask what was up with all the white people and white snow.) And now she is the cigarette-puffing central character in Violet Columbus and Ben Klein’s The Exiles, which executive produced […]
by Lauren Wissot on Jan 21, 2022 -
Travel Companions: Steven Soderbergh on Cruise-Ship Shooting, Working with Deborah Eisenberg and Meryl Streep, and Let Them All Talk
In August 2019, when Steven Soderbergh shot Let Them All Talk, COVID-19 was not on his mind, except to the degree that his research on Contagion (2011) had convinced him that a pandemic similar to the one depicted in the film was inevitable. And yet, one of the most compelling aspects of the workaholic director’s latest feature (streaming this Fall on HBO Max) is that the eight-day Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary 2, during which most of the movie is set, now can be read as a metaphor for the necessarily transformational journey from before to after COVID. In […]
by Amy Taubin on Oct 28, 2020 -
“Whatever I’m Working on Sort of Annihilates Everything That Came Before It”: Steven Soderbergh on the 20th Anniversary of Erin Brockovich
Twenty years ago this month, director Steven Soderbergh achieved what most filmmakers dream of but rarely experience when his Erin Brockovich proved to be that rarest of movies: an artistic success that was also a box-office smash embraced by critics. An aggressively linear drama following the structural gymnastics of The Limey, Erin Brockovich was nevertheless every bit as smart, adult, and distinctive as Soderbergh’s other recent work; combining the journalistic detail of All the President’s Men with the working-class character study of Norma Rae and the entertainment value of a 1940s Howard Hawks comedy, it proved that 1998’s Out of […]
by Jim Hemphill on Mar 12, 2020
